


Trobar de peis

by laughingpineapple



Category: Omar Rayyan - Works
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-12 04:49:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9056050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: It's about a Neptunian, abyssal love.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [antonomasia09](https://archiveofourown.org/users/antonomasia09/gifts).



Dante Alighieri, in his treatise _De vulgari eloquentia_ , sets aside a footnote for the coastal practice of _trobar de peis_ , a minor branch of the more common _trobar clus_. As Eleanor of Aquitaine mentions in her letters, the practice is believed to have had its cradle in the town of Narbonne and from there to have followed the Mediterranean shores from Toulon to to Nice, to Genoa, to sandy Tuscany - which probably explains the poet's interest. Alighieri lists its themes as fiction - rhetorical, musical, poetical, but fiction nonetheless - but then, he was from Florence, safely nested in the Chianti hills, untouched by the Tyrrhenian tides and the deeper ocean beyond.

The troubadour's verses, Alighieri notes, with the exception of a few humorous satires on the clashing calls of seagulls, ebb and flow through the composition, following an esoteric chart of lunar phases; an intricate meter crosses surface rhymes with deep water stanzas, passionate and disciplined at once. What he does not say (out of reticence, no doubt, as, being a poet himself, or rather _the_ poet in these lands, he surely grasped the severity of the issue) is: it is not easy to love the sea. To see it as worthy, unlike one’s perfectible self; to bow to the waves as an act of humiliation and exaltation at once, is to accept a boundless love that overflows.

  
There is but one troubadour de peis left on the peninsula - should you catch him without his trusted tuna, you will recognise his trade by his his knowing smile, or by the brined twirl of his mustache. Last year, around this month, he met a travelling fellow who played the bass and their duet in front of city hall spontaneously drafted a resolution for the ban of fishing light attractors within municipal waters and bays. I hear he was last spotted in Naples, playing in the gardens of the royal palace to an audience of worms and debris. May he find an apprentice.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> "Troubadour tuning a tuna" - best Yuletide nom or BEST Yuletide nom? Wish I could've treated it with a longer and more polished piece but but but at least this had to happen <3


End file.
